...We, the People, are the militia, an obvious fact also codified in federal law.
We, the citizenry, are to be armed with weapons of contemporary military utility against both common savages, and those who imagine themselves fit to rule over men instead of serving them.
Perhaps Founding Father Tench Coxe explained it best in 1799 in the Philadelphia Aurora as tensions arose between Federalists and Republicans:
"Do you wish to preserve your rights? Arm yourselves. Do you desire to secure your dwellings? Arm yourselves. Do you wish your wives and daughters protected? Arm yourselves. Do you wish to be defended against assassins or the Bully Rocks of faction? Arm yourselves. Do you desire to assemble in security to consult for your own good or the good of your country? Arm yourselves. To arms, to arms, and you may then sit down contented, each man under his own vine and his own fig-tree and have no one to make him afraid….If you are desirous to counteract a design pregnant with misery and ruin, then arm yourselves; for in a firm, imposing and dignified attitude, will consist your own security and that of your families. To arms, then to arms."
The increasing small and desperate progressive faction within the Democrat Party feels their chance to “make the world a better place” is slipping away, as they’ve lost a thousand elected seats nationwide, and stand to lose many more in 2016. They are manufacturing the fiction of a “gun violence epidemic” as their last,, best chance of establishing themselves as rulers, even as violence committed with firearms continues to plummet.
Let me take this opportunity to calmly and rationally offer my rebuttal to the editorial board of the New York Times.
I will not give up my guns. You will have to try to take them.
One of us will die....